Pay TV users typically rarely watch the production media-content (i.e. information and experiences of value to an end-user/audience) in its original form, rather various instances of the original content is what most consumers typically view. The term “instance”, in all of its grammatical forms, as used in the present specification and claims, refers to the version of the content with interleaved channel specific promotional material and advertisement patterns—that keeps changing time-to-time across regions and channels for the same content.
Multiple instances of the same content are broadcast and often re-broadcast on different channels or services (for example, and without limiting the generality of the foregoing, a “+1 channel”, a catch-up service, and so forth) that can also be recorded to TV terminals such as set-top box, personal video recorders or over-the-top (OTT) enabled companion devices by the consumers.
Intra-content (timeline) metadata (i.e. metadata associated with a point in time inside the content) can be associated with any content, either automatically by analyzing the content in real time, or by aggregating real time feeds, like social feeds or 3rd party feeds, e.g. sports statistics during a live game.
A TV viewer may choose to watch an instance of content live from the broadcast or may decide to view it in a non-real time fashion, either offline (i.e. playback from DVR) or through an alternative on-line option (e.g., catch-up service, +1 channel or directly from content provider's portal). But in any of these cases the viewer typically would like to receive the same timeline metadata as if the viewer was watching the content during its original broadcast, when it is possible that timeline metadata will be gathered in quality and quantity. TV consumers need to have access to continuously growing timeline metadata of the content irrespective of whether the playback on their devices is from live broadcast or from personal video recorders.